Office 2007 Themes standardize document look, feel

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA It can be a significant challenge to ensure that your company’s documents have the same look and feel, particularly when you’re using Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook together. Fortunately Office 2007’s Themes feature can simplify the process. Office 2007 ships with twenty built-in themes that you can readily apply, or …

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Understanding the Undo option in Excel

By David H. Ringstrom One of my favorite features in Excel is the Undo feature, which as you might expect, allows you to undo the last action that you carried out in Excel. Indeed, you can generally undo multiple steps in Excel. However, there are some caveats to this functionality, as well as a couple …

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Trick For Hiding Rows

In Excel 2007, save a couple clicks when hiding rows or columns: choose Format, Row Height or Column Width, and enter 0.

Navigation Menu Trick

Right-click on the navigation arrows in the lower left-hand corner of the screen to display a worksheet selection menu.

Update Multiple Cells At Once

Update multiple cells at once: select two or more cells, type an entry in the first cell, and then press Ctrl-Enter.

Excel Tip: Hide an Excel Worksheet in Plain Sight

Excel Tip: Hide an Excel Worksheet in Plain Sight By David Ringstrom, CPA As you’re probably aware, it’s simple to hide a worksheet in Excel 2007: right-click on the worksheet tab, and then choose Hide. To unhide the worksheet, right-click on any worksheet tab, choose Unhide, and then select the sheet you wish to make …

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Copying Cell Contents Down

Double-click fill handle to copy current cell down, stops at the first blank in adjacent column. Or select cells & press Ctrl-D.

AND() Function

The AND function allows you to tests for two or more conditions in an IF statement. =IF(AND(A1>=1,A1

Concatenation Trick

Use an ampersand instead of the CONCATENATE function. The formula =A1&”-“&B1 is much easier than =CONCATENATE(A1,”-“,B1)

Formatting Sets Of Rows

Use this formula with Conditional Formatting to highlight alternating sets of 5 rows: =MOD(CEILING(ROW(),5),2)

Three tricks for formatting rows in Excel

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA I’m sure that you’ve worked with data sets in Excel where the information starts blurring together. In this article I discuss several techniques that I use avoid getting lost in the forest. First I’ll briefly describe the Table feature in Excel 2007 and Excel 2010, and then share some conditional …

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Create A Series Of Month End Dates

Create month-end date series- Cell A1: 10/31/09, Cell A2: =DATE(YEAR(A1),MONTH(A1)+2,0), copy down as needed.

Number Formatting Trick

Press Ctrl-Shift-! to apply the Number format, e.g. 1,234.56, to one or more cells that you’ve selected.

Removing Borders Trick

Press Ctrl-Shift-_ (underscore) to remove borders from a cell.

Data Entry Trick

Press Alt-Down Arrow to get an in-cell drop-down list of adjacent entries in the current column